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I first heard its unique and loud call from inside the house and after the third sounding came to the bay window in the dining room to see what I could see, which was nothing because it clammed up for whatever reason. Then I saw the way the afternoon sunlight was hitting the few remaining suflowers and I decided to bust out the DSLR to more properly immortalize them…

And while I was moving around Coyote Corner doing just that the bird called again almost from directly over my head in the tree overhanging the sunflowers, and there it was (click it for the bigger picture):

Much larger than your average parakeet, it looked more cockatiel than conure, but I’ve never seen so colorful a cockatiel. And unlike the skittish flocks of yellow-chevroned parakeets that can often be found flitting noisily about the place, this bird had no problem being in such close proximity to me, leading me to think it either was or had been a pet. And when I mimicked its tweets we even got something of a dialogue going on, at least until it tired of the dead-end conversation and flew westward out of the tree directly into the setting sun where I lost sight of it, but later heard it tweeting from somewhere across the street.

So if anyone’s missing a unique looking and sounding bird or knows of someone who is, it was last seen and heard yesterday afternoon south of Sunset and east of Silver Lake Boulevard here in Silver Lake.

Literally moments after Susan had left this morning for her regular salon visit, a strange cat sound issues forth from the kitchen area and I arrive from the study to find a nice-sized alligator lizard on the floor bracketed on either side by Pepper and Ranger who are both looking down at it rather tentatively.

I immediately advise the cat and dog to vacate their locations and they do. Unfortunately so does the nice-sized lizard, straight into the space under the large free-standing pantry (that Susan built by herself several years before meeting me). I can’t say if Susan ever cleaned that void the lizard now occupied before I came on the scene in 2004, but I know for a fact that in the six years since then it has been left untouched as dustbunny incubator.

As is sometimes the case with me, simple plans have a way of getting complicated, and my simple plan to drag a rod across the space beneath the pantry and force the the lizard out from under the undoubtedly filthy place got really complicated when after doing so there was no lizard. In the reptile’s place came shoved out an amazing bundle of pet hair, an old barely chewed rawhide bone, and various bits of cat and dog kibble.

So my next step was to move the pantry out into the kitchen in hopes of revealing the lizard. But all that revealed was more pet hair, and by more I mean a metric shitload. On the OMFG scale of 1-10, 10 being Evacuate Immediately, this was an 8.

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Arachnophobes beware! I finally timed it right and captured the largest of the many orb weavers in our backyard this morning building its new web. This timelapse at a frame a second, captures about an hour’s worth of webspinning.

Last year, or perhaps the year before, a lady friend who previously blogged under the nom du net of Jo Gillis sent me a batch of sunflower seeds harvested from some she’d grown that year. This is the first one to present itself among the mostly smaller lemon queen sunflowers that surround it.

It is magnificificifitrifiwificent. And I photographed it not just because it is bodacious, but because the squirrels are apt to come get it, behead it and take it away any minute. Literally: at any time.

Having decimated the backyard patch, they’ve now quit ignoring the flowers of Coyote Corner and have started their path of piecemeal destruction. And I am doing my level best through clenched fists, teeth, and sphincter to leave the pellet gun alone and understand that squirrels are a part of the econiche and are just exploiting the resources made available.

But it’s hard. And it’ll be harder when I look out the window and see this beauty gone.

After weeks of counting pollinators as part of my ongoing involvement with the Great Sunflower Project, I thrill with every bee I see. But I have to say, I’d been hoping for a little more variety beyond just honeybees.. Well, that variety arrived with my count including my first carpenter bee — and my timelapse captured its arrival to the flower beautifully (click it for the bigger picture).

Well, it finally happened. After two months and a fair amount of nurturing, cajoling (and head shaking for planting so many sunflowers in such a generally sunless spot of the front yard, Coyote Corner is proud to present its first blossom of the bunch, as shown half-opened as of this morning in a capture from our SunflowerPatchCam, (which updates every 10 minutes):

Hopefully many more to come!

In the course of my timelapse of a sunflower yesterday I was enthralled by one of the tiny visitors the camera captured during its extended stay:

Just can’t help myself from sharing when I find a nice still from the timelapses I do of the sunflowers in my backyard patch (click it for the bigger picture):

As to why I timelapse? It’s all part of making my voluntary observations for the Great Sunflower Project more efficient. Rather than physically park myself in front of a chosen flower for a 30-minute interval (when I should be working), I let my camera capture whatever activity occurs for review at a later time. In the words of Dana Carvey’s “Church Lady,” how conveeeeeeeeeenient!.

PS. That round rusted thing hanging in the background on the well-weathered northside fence post was unearthed by me during some of my previous backyarchaeological excavations. I think it’s something related to a brake system from some old jalopy that was parked back here before the garage got built in 1916, but if anyone eyeballing it has a more-informed idea I’d love to hear it.

There I was sun-dappled and slaving away outside on the laptop, the tracks of a CD of Spanish guitar music filling the space with sound from the two wireless outdoor  faux-rock speakers I’m so glad I bought last week. Two cats were napping opposite me in patio chairs and a drowsy Ranger dog snoozed at my feet.

Such can be my workday hell.

When I first heard the tapping behind me I figured it would be just one of those rascally squirrels gnawing on a walnut from the tree next door and so I ignored it. But the noise continued and  there was something too percussive about it to be a rodent.

So I got up and looked closer and sure enough it was a rate treat: a Nuttall’s woodpecker doing its very best to extract and eat whatever insectivorous nutrition might have been available from the branch to which it clung. It also did its very best to avoid any positions on the branches that might allow me to get a great shot of it. Of the 48,004 snapped this was the best and least obstructed of ‘em (click for the bigger picture):

This was the sunflower whose main bloom that the renegade squirrels took left me shaking fists at the rascally rogues. But one of the beautiful aspects of sunflowers is when they lose their heads, often times they’ll just shrug off the setback and make more. In this case, this subsequent flower pictured is one of three that have since opened up. Though none are near as large as the handful of initial blossom that was lost, size certainly does not matter to the bees, such as the one pictured above, coming in for a landing (click for the bigger picture).

In other news, I haven’t lost a bloom since Sunday when I removed the chicken wire fencing I put up around them when I first planted the seedlings in the soil. Turns out the perimeter barrier, which did a great job protecting the flowers as they grew to blooms, only better enabled the raiding squirrels’ access to their tasty bits.